Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Awards More Than $50 Million in Grants

February 9, 2017

The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub has announced grants totaling more than $50 million to forty-seven engineers, scientists, and technologists in support of their efforts to develop tools and techniques that can accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.

Launched with $600 million from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and in partnership with Stanford University, the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley, CZBiohub is part of Chan Zuckerberg Science, a ten-year, $3 billion effort aimed at preventing, managing, or curing human disease. The first cohort of Biohub Investigators — twenty-two junior investigators and twenty-five senior investigators, including twenty-one women, at the three universities — will receive five-year grants of up to $1.5 million each to conduct high-risk research in areas ranging from biology and chemistry to computer science, engineering, mathematics, and physics.

Recipients include Hana El-Samad (UCSF School of Medicine), who studies feedback loops, a fundamental underpinning of life on the planet, to understand their interconnected architecture and predict their failure modes in disease; Manu Prakash (Stanford), who is working to devise new ultra-low-cost microscopy platforms for the diagnosis and surveillance of schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis, and malaria; and Rikky Mueller (UC Berkeley), who is working to develop wireless microsystems that directly interface with the brain and facilitate long-term, minimally invasive neurological recording.

"CZ Biohub Investigators share our vision of a planet without disease," said Joseph DeRisi, co-president of CZ Biohub and professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UCSF. "To realize this vision, we are giving some of the world's most creative and brilliant researchers access to groundbreaking technology and the freedom to pursue high-risk research. CZ Biohub Investigators will challenge traditional thinking in pursuit of radical discoveries that will make even the most stubborn and deadly diseases treatable."